Friday 19 December 2008

Getting a Canon MP620 working with Ubuntu 8.04 x86_64

Not quite as straight forward as it should be from Ubuntu land. Following on from this other blog...

First job is to get it on the wireless network, I had to use winxp and the bundled client to poke the right values in the printer for WEP config. Printing from XP was flawless, naturally.

For Ubuntu printing, we need to build cups-bjnp but with 8.04 there is a snag. Just doing:

apt-get install libcupsys2-dev

.. results in all dependencies bar 1 file, 'sidechannel.h', which can be extracted from upstream 1.3.8 (cups/sidechannel.h) and copied into /usr/include/cups.

Making cups-bjnp was straight forward 'make', followed by 'make install' which adds 'bjnp' as a printer back-end in cups.

In the Printer Configuration wizard, setting up the MP620 was just a case of selecting the Canon610 being the closest relative, and adding the IP address of the printer.

The next stumble was finding test pages would be processed by the printer but never printed. This was simply a useless default setting for media source, picking 'automatic paper source switching' fixed that, and prints come forth.

If printing doesn't start almost immediately, the paper source/sizes are probably incorrect, check print options in the application used to print.

Close but no cigar, so far. I can print to the MP620 but test pages come out 'split' with almost 1 for 1 white lines horizontally, cutting off an A4 print at just after the Magenta text. Plain text prints suffer the same issues. Gah, its like looking at an ancient green screen Commodore PET! Its not the printer, can print XP test pages fine, can copy XP test pages fine. CUPS and/or printer settings not quiet right. Will post more details when I figure it out.

8 comments:

Unknown said...

I've got the exact same issues. Can't wait for a solution

javahollic said...

Figured out the details, see Ubuntu forums for the 64bit printing solution.

chris r said...

Trying to follow your instructions, but get error message: cups 1.3.8 ... could not be opened because helper programme does not exist. Change association in your prefs. Some help would be greatly appreciated!

chris r said...

... I'm on 8.10 and have the printer working fine wirelessly with vista.

javahollic said...

The thing about the upstream cups zip is that you dont install it, download it, extract the sidechannel.h file and copy. This then lets you build bjnp.

Forcing the official 32bit install drivers onto 64bit is easy enough (--force-platform), the only quirk is on the installation of the .ppd, following the advice I found somewhere, I had to add MP620 to the models listed in it. Then the cups lookup seemed to find the right printer driver.

If you can indicate what you did so far, and more details on where you are stuck I can offer advice.

chris r said...

Thanks for help. Will go with this. Ta.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Hey guys check this page out, it has all of the packages and steps for getting the MP620 working on ubuntu 10.04. It was easy and worked for me.

http://bkintegration.com/?p=235#more-235

MP620 Ubuntu Setup